WordPress to dominate the CMS market in 2021 – An analysis

What started as a tool to write blogs has come a long way since 2003. WordPress, arguably the most popular CMS platform, is going strong with a whopping 61.8% market share, according to W3techs. This is more than the market share of all other CMS platforms combined, namely, Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, and others. To understand the dominance of WordPress in the CMS market, let us view some statistics.

• WordPress powers 33.5% of all active websites (Source: Hosting Tribunal)
• More than 50,000 websites are developed daily using WordPress (Source: Expanded Ramblings)
• WordPress is searched on Google for approximate 37 million times per monthThe question arises that if everything is going in favour of WordPress for all these years, will the CMS platform continue to hold its position in the year 2021 as well? To answer that let us first understand as to why WordPress has maintained its dominance in the CMS market for all these years?

Why WordPress dominates the CMS market?

There are a plethora of reasons for individuals, organizations, and entities to choose WordPress as the platform to build their websites. Let us discuss them in the below sections:

Makes SEO easier: Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a critical process to get user traffic to a website, both in terms of quality and quantity. Hence, with plugins like Yoast SEO and others, it is incredibly easy to optimize a website for SEO without having extensive knowledge of coding. One only needs to configure a few settings and the plugins can take off from there. Besides, a few plugins even offer suggestions to optimize the content.
WordPress is the most recommended CMS for any blog-centric website. Quick fact: WordPress allows users to write in more than 120 languages (Source: WordPress).

Mobile-friendly: WordPress provides several plugins to create highly functional websites that are optimized for seamless viewing across devices, especially on mobiles of various screen sizes and configurations. Plugins such as WP Mobile Edition, WPTouch, and Jetpack can facilitate the creation of robust, uncluttered, and legible websites with proper spacing of hyperlinks. No wonder, the WordPress development services are in great demand given the need to create mobile-friendly sites with great UI/UX.

Quick Loading: The speed at which a website loads plays a key role in determining its user experience and popularity with the target visitors. By choosing an appropriate WordPress theme and putting in place speed optimization techniques, one can achieve faster load times.

Customizable: With features like real-time WordPress Customizer one can easily customize a website even without possessing the knowledge of coding. Also, features like live Twitter feeds, event calendars, and image galleries can result in the development of beautiful and user-friendly layouts. Tools like OptinMonster to add more email subscribers, Google Analytics to track visitors, or Yoast SEO to turn the website SEO optimized can be integrated to offer more flexibility. Moreover, WordPress offers more than 5000 themes and 53000 plugins free of cost compared to its rival Drupal’s 2500+ themes and 39000 modules. Read our blog on how to choose a CMS platform between WordPress and Drupal, and know about the benefits of using WordPress.

Great Interface: WordPress offers a WYSISYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface, which makes it easy for editors and writers even with a non-technical background to administer the website. Using such a layout ensures that developers/writers/editors/administrators can visualize how the content would appear without having to type elaborate layout commands.

Robust Security: Today, when cybersecurity has become a big factor in fostering user trust, WordPress offers several themes and plugins (paid and free) to prevent threats from DDoS attacks, Cross-Site Scripting, SQL injection, and Malware, among others. However, one should integrate only verified security plugins.

Quick Learning Curve: Thanks to being intuitive and user-friendly, WordPress can be easily learnt by a non-technical person compared to other platforms. It allows even a non-programmer to build a website with a large community base lending support and resolving queries.

Cost-effective: Being open-source, WordPress and its various built-in plugins and themes come free. So, unless one takes into account factors such as domain registration and the addition of premium security features, third-party plugins and themes, WordPress can be very cost-effective to build a website.

REST API: WordPress provides a REST API to help build interesting and user-friendly mobile applications. In the days where mobile applications rule the roost as far as internet browsing is concerned, WordPress based REST API can come in handy for developers to transfer data to the application.

Accessible to people with disabilities: By adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at level AA, the core team of WordPress is ensuring the CMS platform and its future editions are accessible to people with physical or sensory disabilities.

WooCommerce: When it comes to building online stores, WooCommerce, the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress runs more than 1.5 million online stores and commands a 27% market share in the eCommerce market. Read our blog to know how good is WooCommerce as an eCommerce solution.

Easily Manageable: WordPress is a superb CMS that allows even non-tech website owners to manage their websites without breaking a sweat. If you own a WordPress based website, you don’t need to have coding expertise to manage the content on the web pages. You can easily add or remove pages, manage the existing features, and perform other tasks.

Big brands using WordPress: The popularity of WordPress as a CMS platform is not only among the smaller brands but big brands as well. Names like Harvard University, BBC America, Mercedes Benz, Sony Music, Reuters, Time, and Beyonce have chosen WordPress to develop their websites. So, with such big names rooting for WordPress, it is obvious why it garners bigger eyeballs.

Conclusion
In an increasingly competitive digital space where factors like scalability, security, user-friendliness, SEO-optimization, responsiveness, cost, and design aesthetics, not necessarily in that order, have become critical for a website to attract its target users, WordPress stands like a colossus. In 2021, enterprises, big or small, shall continue to repose their trust in WordPress given its myriad advantages as mentioned above. However, it is important to choose an experienced WordPress development company in India to build a website (informational or eCommerce) instead of getting carried away by the cost factor and then ruing the decision.